Working from home.....

Hi,
I have free reign to work from home, pretty much all the time. I am the sole person on a project which only my boss knows about and although i have tried to bounce some ideas off he says he doesn't have much time and doesn't know the codebase.

Knowing i have a ton of work to do on it but can't get away from reading aimlessly on blogs/youtube etc. Feel like I am the WTF.

Anyone know any ways to help with this? I have tried to plan goals and little code sprints with myself but i can't be arsed to complete them....

Is there anything to stop you going into the office for a few weeks until you have the basics hammered out and can go back to WFH to do the bulk of it? You might find it easier to stay motivated if you're in a work environment for the start of the project.

Alternatively, make sure your home working PC is in a location that's only used for work and keep a routine of getting up and dressing for work to keep you in the right mindset

@Jaloopa
Done that.
Office is about 2hrs drive away. Plan to go in next week for a couple of days just as a change of scenery actually. However in the office I have found that after all the usual hellos the same thing happens. We all have our own offices and everyone goes off to work on their own things. My mind just wanders.

I use music. If I can find motivating music that makes me want to get shit done, it'll help ease the transition until my brain picks up a problem I want to tackle, at which point I get in the flow and it stops being so hard.

He doesn't need advice; he knows how to knuckle down and get work done or he wouldn't have gotten this cushy job. He just needs to stop slacking off and do it the way he did it when he did the projects that got put on his resume that let to him being here in the first place and yes I know this sentence is confusing.

The point is, he already demonstrably has the ability. So I don't get the point of the thread.

@otter So you're saying he somehow graduated high school, probably attended college, then got a job and put some great things on his resume so he could eventually get in this cushy job without once having to focus on an unpleasant task? I don't believe that.

He knows how to do it. He's obviously done it before. He doesn't need advice.

have you felt productive in the past? Do now what you did then.
If you've never been productive in your entire career, then you should vacate that job to someone who has and go stand

Exactly

Perhaps i should say...... this is not a new greenfield project.
It's re-factoring piles of VB6 copy pasta shit without up to date documentation. Once eventually to be migrated to .NET. I think I have mentioned it in the past.

@blakeyrat
No, refactor first. There are some other 'third party' hurdles before moving to .NET. But we came to the conclusion that re-factoring and taking out almost half of the copy pasta code will simplify conversion. And you know, converted shit is still shit.

Thinking about pomodoro I did some sketches to help break down the tasks into smaller jobs. Effectively mini design documents.

Using my new sketches I achieved more in an hour then I did yesterday.

PROFIT....

TIL I relearned why we don't be casual about these things.
It turns out I was wrong to turn my back on years of experience by saying "pfft we can re-factor and keep the code functioning the same. Stuff the design documents i've got this covered."

But some languages are easier to write tests for and refactor safely than others. It's complicated. It might be harder to do the conversion, but I'd still say the faster you jump the better for something like this.

Haikus are quite fun
though I do them rather wrong
enjoy them, you fools

@Helix At this stage, you just need to show your boss that you are responsible and can work from home. So go home, and do your job.

I'm in the same boat now. I can work from home any time I like. It's great. I save hours on my commute when it's convenient for everybody. But to get to that point, I had to show that my time working from home is at least as valuable to the firm as the time I'm in the office. It's just a perk. If you want it, you need to do your part.

That's stupid. People have various ways of getting focused and some of the things they do might help him. It might be different than what he did as a teenager.

Well the company hired him because he can deliver projects, right? So at some point he could deliver projects. He needs to do now what he did then. That's all I'm saying.

The high school stuff was just because fbmac (who, BTW, why isn't he banned yet?) was suggesting that Helix somehow went an entire career without ever having to do hard work, which I found pretty difficult to believe.

Desk and chair. The more comfortable they are, the less likely you are to think about that couch across the room.

Work atmosphere. As hipsterish as that sound, take a laptop and go to a coffee shop or a co-working space. Being surrounded by working people can help.

I can't say I've been 100% successful with any of these. I still fail to consistently put in the level of effort I'd like to.

+1.000

The only thing you can do is try to create a work atmosphere, and even then you'll inevitably fail to be productive half of the time. But don't worry: You would be slacking off just as much in the office as well, you just feel more guilty if you do it at home.

so while I've written out all the scripts, put them in source control, and pre-written a "download script from source control and execute" script to paste into the box, I've still gotta paste server name, username, password, script into it. A billion times.

@asdf Far as I can tell, yes. I make heavy use of the "clone configuration" button, but if I clone a deploy job with only one server and need to make one with two servers, I can't clone the task itself, I have to re-enter the information for the second server.

I have a work area that is only for work. When I go there, it is time to get shit done. I goof off in other areas of the house, but that area is just for working. (mostly)

Get dressed for work when it is time for work. You don't need to put on a suit and tie or anything. But at least jeans and shoes. If you are sitting around in a pair of old basketball shorts and a grotty t-shirt, you will fuck off instead of working.

Play some music, but possibly the type of stuff you would hear in an office. You don't want to drum along with it or sing along with it, but you don't want to hate it either. It needs to become white noise to you.

Take breaks. No one can keep their nose to the grindstone for 8-10 hours straight without their mind wandering. You are working from home. Go for a walk, have a decent lunch, go play with a pet. Our work is mentally fatiguing. If you were doing manual labor carrying heavy shit, occasionally you would stop and rest your body. Do the same for your mind.

Figure out when you work best. Are you most productive in the morning? Evening? Late at night? Afternoon? Whatever time that is, work then. You are working from home, fit your work to your productive hours. I work best late at night, so I do a lot of things then. There are still some things I have to do during the day. I take care of those then, but do the other stuff when my mind works best.

Hmmmmm, there are probably some other things. But that is all I can think of for now.

Perhaps i should say...... this is not a new greenfield project.
It's re-factoring piles of VB6 copy pasta shit without up to date documentation. Once eventually to be migrated to .NET. I think I have mentioned it in the past.
The project that makes me give up dev.

I think your major problem may be that you are bored. You are uninterested. How you keep your mind on your work under those conditions...I don't know. Do your best, or try to get a different project? If I had to do that every day, I would probably be begging for the sweet relief that only death could bring.

@Polygeekery Cripes. VB6 is not that bad. The biggest problem is probably half your tools no longer run correctly, although I know the IDE worked ok still in Windows 8 so I presume it still does in 10.

@Yamikuronue Technically, if you can do it over the web, you can script it…

But yes, I can understand just wanting to get it done. (Just been in the same position for instantiating a bunch of data ingestion systems. They were all very slightly different from each other; clone-tweak-clone-tweak-… And not quite enough of them to really justify switching to code.)